ENGINEERING BULLETIN

Reggie Herndon returned to college because he wanted to change careers. What he didn’t want was another degree.

Herndon, a University of Tennessee graduate from Lynchburg, Va., is on his way instead to finishing a nine-month professional certificate in counterintelligence from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pa., which he hopes will bolster his odds of landing a job as an intelligence analyst with a defense contractor or government agency.

“I decided that I wanted to re-engineer myself,” said Herndon, 56, who handles marketing for an employment program runs under contract to the Social Security Administration. “But I didn’t want to go back and do the whole graduate program, and come out with a tremendous amount of debt.”

Responding to demand from more and more students like Herndon, universities are jumping into the business of providing professional certificates that were once the domain of community colleges and for-profit providers like the University of Phoenix.

“The growth is huge,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, which is studying this new phenomenon.

Certificate programs can be added and updated more quickly than conventional academic ones. And they can help workers keep up with fast-changing fields such as information technology and intelligence, or get raises or promotions.

But a main reason for the explosion in the number of professional certificates at traditional universities, administrators concede, is that they bring in revenue, largely from mid-career students who pay the full cost without needing institutional financial aid, or whose employers reimburse them for tuition.

“It’s a good side-business for four-year colleges and graduate schools,” said Carnevale.

At a time when higher-education budgets are being further and further stretched, universities want a piece of what the Georgetown center estimates is $140 billion a year spent on formal career training nationwide, about 40% of which is siphoned into educational institutions.

full text of the article: the Time - with reference to University World News

photo: from The Time website